Ah, Denuvo; the anti-tamper tech that a lot of gamers hate. And while some people may claim that this attitude comes from the fact that the games powered by it are hard to crack, the latest triple-A game powered by it, PREY, has already been cracked.

While it did not break the record for the fastest Denuvo-powered game cracked, it’s a real surprise that the latest, and more powerful, version of the Denuvo is unable to protect these games for more than ten days.

For what it’s worth, Resident Evil VII remains the fastest cracked Denuvo-powered game as it was cracked in just five days, while Mass Effect: Andromeda is close to PREY as it was cracked in ten – more or less – days.

Re:Will they just stop?Re:Will they just stop?(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19, @02:38PM
(1 child)

Reminds me of the zika scare. The tests for the virus were non specific (picking up dengue fever et al), the "disease" was not a disability (micrencephaly is associated with disability, not microcephaly; and even that connection is dubious), and the treatment was abortions...

Re:Will they just stop?(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 20, @01:51AM

According to Wik... never mind. Wikipedia is in on the conspiracy too isn't it. Can we even trust the Oxford English Dictionary??? This is clearly a plot by the lizard people, who are beaming authentic copies of the OED out of libraries everywhere and replacing all 20 volumes of the OED with a doctored version so they can perform ABORTIONS!!! ABORTiONS!!!!!ABoRTiOnSSSSS!!!!!one!!eleven!!!!

Because an intelligent but malevolent species visiting our planet from 308 light years away in order to kill all humans and take it over, a space-faring civilization that has ansibles and transporters, and the BEST plan they can come up with is some convoluted etymological strategy to convince people to have ABORTIONS!!!!!!!! (just checked the OED and "ABORTIONS!!!!!!!" has been spelled that way with several exclamation marks since a usage in 1623, from Middle English, then Old French, and the original Greek root word which only had two exclamation points... huh, thought it was Latin, but my OED says it's Greek so must check out).

Note: I did not claim that the lizard people don't exist. I'm simply ridiculing the idea that the lizard people wouldn't just drop a very large mass from orbit and be done with it and instead engage in some crazy conspiracy.... Ridiculous.

Note on the note: The lizard people are actually quite nice once you get to know them.

Note on the note on the note: We apologize for the fault in the notes. Those responsible have been sacked.

They will stop when gamers start...(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19, @08:35AM

Paying the development studios directly via crowdfunding, and as a result of their patronage be required to only sell copies of the game DRM free, bound by a legal statement on their crowdfunding page stating so, with penalties if they don't.

Until then we will remain with the same sick gaming ecosystem that we have had since the shareware indie scene dried up back in the late 90s.

Re:Will they just stop?(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19, @01:34PM

Not all of them [reddit.com]. More than half of Denuvo protected games remain uncracked. There are certainly some online only games in there, but many are notable releases worth playing in single player.

Could they just stop?

Only if a good chunk of the consumer base stops buying DRM-infested games. It would take a major culture shift among gamers for that to happen, so don't hold your breath.

Re:Will they just stop?(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19, @02:07PM

It's like masturbation..They don't want to admit in public that they do it.It is legal but they hate to talk about it.They assume you will like it if you try it.Some people consider it, DRM, unethical and immoral, but they don't care.They keep doing it until someone or thing forces them to stop.It can make your computer go blind.It is a waste of energy with no product.Until proven otherwise they will continue to assume people like taking it up the ass when it is not required needed or wanted.

Not sure it's a tech that gamers hate. Does it get in their way? Most DRM these days is fairly innocuous and the days of not having a compatible CD-drive or whatever are behind us. Probably it checks in, and requires Internet connection, and re-activates if you suddenly change all your hardware, but beyond that does it actually affect a gamer who's purchased the game?

I'm sure it's a tech that "gamers who want to pirate games" mildly dislike, because it means they can't play the latest-and-greatest on release day for nothing. But it's not like they are cracking the games themselves. And those who are, probably find it quite fun to do so - even more so if it's challenging.

There is a middle ground here but I think we don't have a process to find it, or later calibrate it. We need to make a distinction between two markets - those who want to own and those who want to pass over. For example, on Origin you can pay for a "pass" that lets you play any game for 1 month (and only some chapters of some of the AAA games like Mirror's edge). I know people who are using that pass. They don't care about owning the game. So that is one step in the right direction. The other part ought to be removing DRM (along with increase in price) for those who want to own the game.

Right now, we don't really know the price of a game actually. Game publishers set it with some expectation of sales and some imaginary net profit to be made. For example, Mirror's Edge Catalyst was a thoroughly mediocre game (what a shame since I have played the original many times). Yet it goes for the same price as Witcher 3! Same example for comparing price of DLCs - there is no logic between content and its price.

What I am trying to get at, is that because of this mess in pricing, there is no way to know how much a non-DRM'd version of a game will cost. We need to find a way to set this pricing correctly or the big publishers will keep charging exorbitant amounts with less and less service.

Ok... maybe I should have stated I am 65+ and retired... and my childhood memories of games was something in a box bought at a store.

The idea of DRM on a game is very asinine to me. To me, its like a toy which insists on making contact with Milton-Bradley first before I could play with it.

I would not even want such a thing.

With DRM on stuff, its like I am a teenager again, having to beg Dad for use of the car. At which time he states things he wants done before the use of the car is allowed. EULA, so to say.

It puzzles me why people have accepted this "gotta phone home first for permission" thing without also demanding full refund rights is beyond me.

I never even once played the Tetris game that came preinstalled on my phone because the game insisted that I had an internet connection open before it would run.

Same with NextRadio on my Android. That DRM crap made what I thought was just enabling an FM receiver chip on my phone into a useless piece of baggage just sucking down my battery. These DRM people are just as annoying as a swarm of mosquitoes, each trying their damndest to get a drop of blood.

If I had my druthers, people would avoid DRM stuff like they avoid picking up a vegetable which is covered in brown slimy goo at the market.

--"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]

I know what you are saying. Until 3 years ago I was in the same ship. So much that I hadn't played the latest and greatest AAA games at all. But then I played a pirated copy of TESV: Skyrim, right after I had built a new PC. It blew my mind. I had to give them my money. So I sucked it up and paid them.

Now I gave an example of Witcher 3, which I have bought on Steam aka phone-home DRM. But I could have bought it on GOG without DRM too. But steam reduced price for my poor poor country while GOG insisted on earning in dollars.

Now PS4 allows complete owning of games if you buy them on the disc. But they are the last one afaik.

Ultimately, there is a lot of market inefficiency here and there is a lot of resistance in making it mainstream. I hope it gets resolved over time but I don't see anyone trying to do it beside Valve. And they are not friends of the gamers [polygon.com].

I have also bought software after I got the pirate version. I still remember the very first PC software I purchased after "pirating" a copy... Steve Gibson's "Spin-Rite".

I was having issues with my first PC, which I had made from scrounged parts. A friend loaned me his copy of Spin-Rite, and I was so impressed of how well it gave me such a nice detailed report of the disk drives I had bought at swap meets. And there was my problem. Those disks were at the swap meet for a reason: They had given someone else problems too. Now I knew what a crashed disk was. Open it up and see the nice concentric rings etched out of the oxide layers on the disk platters. While its open, take the magnets out ( they work great holding stuff onto your refrigerator! ) , pull off the PCB, and throw the rest in the trash.

Maybe that deal on a disk drive, selling for $400 new at the time, wasn't such a steal at $20, eh? Well, they *looked* good. How was I to know he was selling them out of the box the new replacements came in? Ok... older and a bit wiser. I ended up with a few PCB's full of interesting high speed analog parts and motor driver chips.

I went to the local software store to buy a copy of Spin-Rite, even though the copy I borrowed was working fine. To me, it just wasn't "right" to steal like that. Yes, I did see it as "theft" because the software was so perfect, and the price was not very high. I was looking for it around the store, and could not find it, asked the clerk, he had it behind the counter, as it was not packaged in a fancy large box for resale, it was just one 5 1/4" floppy disk in a modest folder apparently run off by Steve Gibson himself for all I know, and the clerk had them behind the counter so people would not steal them. I damn near lost it in uncontrollable laughter. I already had the software. What I wanted was a paid-for legitimate copy for ME!. About the LAST thing I would have done was steal the disk. I loved that program so much I was determined to pay for it, one way or the other. If similar had happened today, I would have probably looked Steve Gibson's company up on the internet, and sent Gibson anonymous cash payment in an envelope marked "personal", with a little note that I have a copy of his software, he does not need to send me anything, but here's the payment for it. That's generally how I deal with the stuff I run across that I actually use and keep. I would say less than 1 percent of stuff I look at has any value to me. I may look at it, I may archive it, but if I use it, I feel morally I am obligated to pay the author for the use of it.

If I really got technical on the first software for anything I bought, it was an assembler for the 8080, followed by the 6502 macro assembler for the Commodore 64.

None of the above were DRM'd. They just worked. Perfectly.

The DRM'd crap out there is not worth anything to me.

--"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]

A true position to take. But what about people who really don't care about owning things? If I want to rent a game for 2 days, DRM is just an equivalent of the police. For them DRM is essential to enforce the time limit on a rented property.

This is why I am saying that there are two different markets - those who want to own and those who want to rent. Right now, because of what I consider a market inefficiency, the producers/publishers of games are getting away with enforcing the rules of rent on people who want to own. That was my original point. HTH and thanks for reading :)

There is a middle ground here but I think we don't have a process to find it, or later calibrate it.

If your "middle ground" involves any amount of digital restrictions management or proprietary software, then forget it. Those who don't value their privacy or freedom can continue living in their little prisons and never really own anything, while at least some people will reject all of that. No amount of entertainment is worth sacrificing my freedom and/or privacy for.

Re:Really?(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 20, @02:54AM

I think you missed the point that Cuban's most recent point is that AC missed the point, and everybody needs to actually go and read that comment instead of circle-jerk-knee-jerking to a sentence introducing a much more nuanced idea.

Personally I did read past the first sentence, and I thought that Cuban made a fair point. A++++ would read again.

I mean, isn't that the point???

If not... what's the point?

(This must be why old men don't bother with making points. There's no point.)

That is one position, which is a valid position. Yet there are people who don't care about owning anything digitally and would rather perpetually rent it. For example, I know people who don't plan to own a house ever. Or a better example - I know people who don't care about the source code of the software they use. Does catering to those people an inherently bad thing?

I only bought one game, "Rocksmith" a few years ago. This one already has "DRM" built in the USB guitar cable, but for some reason it had Steam too.

Probably it checks in, and requires Internet connection

Yes, Steam did that. Then it auto-updates (Steam, not the game). This takes like forever. Then it restarts (Steam) and checks for an update again. After that, it loads advertising. Many megabytes of it. After loading advertising, it displays it in a way so it's difficult to find the "just play the game I installed, please" button. Then sometimes it starts the game, other times it starts some random error (online connection error XYZ, cable not recognized, wrong password, please update your user profile, etc).

It's been *years* since that experience and I still haven't forgotten it. The cracked version I eventually downloaded just played the game. You can't play the game without the cable. Why Steam?

My guess is because nowadays everyone wants to spy on you. Different than Google and Facebook, they also want your money. Similar to Microsoft.

Re:Really?(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 19, @09:38AM

I have not bought ANY games for my PC - for the exact reasons you cited. I know money-across-the-counter is a one-way trip. As far as I am concerned, if someone wants to protect their right to control it after I buy it, I also protect my right NOT to buy.

I actually spent REAL EARNED MONEY for an Electronic Arts game for a Commodore64 many years ago - and I got so pissed at it hammering away at the disk drive, pounding its head against the stop over and over and over again. That is when I became familiar with Digital Rights Management. They had the right to tear up my stuff, and thought that would make me receptive to their business model? How about my sending THEM my service bill for realignment services to my disk drive?

Oh, didn't you read the EULA? We have the RIGHT to tear up your stuff. We are a Business... we expect you to honor OUR rights, but we are at liberty to trample all over YOUR rights. Because we say so. In the EULA. Congress Agrees!

Yes it does. DRM-infested games are not purchases, they are leases for an undetermined period. If you run out of activations or the servers close, your game is forfeit. Many games requiring online activation are unplayable by legitimate means today.

Well, it's still better than "buying" digital videos on Amazon.Their terms actually say right there "we do not promise the content will be available in any region, including the one you buy it for and including when you buy it".That's basically saying "feel free to leave your money, but we don't actually promise you will get anything at all in return".At that point I just decided to put them into the "not worth even considering" list.

State of the crack(Score: 3, Informative) by looorg on Friday May 19, @08:51AM

I'm not sure one should say it's pointless due to a couple of titles being cracked in a week or two. Prey and Mass Effect Andromeda being the two in question. In the same time frame (as in a fairly new title) there are still uncracked games such as For Honor, Sniper Elite 4, Bulletstorm, Warhammer 40k Dawn of War III. You can look up the list at the Denuvo wikipedia page and there is a list of games protected with release date and crack date. There is a fair amount of games now that are going on a year or two years that remain uncracked, Total War Warhammer as an example. Even for some popular games it has been taking over 100+ days for a crack to appear. That might not entirely be based on the strength of the protection tho, a lot of might also now have to do with the titles just being old and the scene might not care for a crack for a game like FIFA 16 when FIFA 17 is already available.

Then there is the whole debate if it's, or they are, a (real) crack or not. As in have the protection been removed (and broken) or has it just been deactivated or is it stuck in some virtualmachineemulation loop or wrapper and can't get out. Was the protection cracked or did they just find some fault in the implementation or is it some other kind of bug. One train of thought would be that if it was a real crack they would just release the entire backlog -- the product is utterly defeated and there is no hope or use left, at the same time it could be counterproductive to do so since every crack they make is, probably, analyzed by Denvuo to identify the flaw and method to once again strengthen their product. But there are, as noted, options available so to speak.

There is a bias to my outlook, as I consider most stuff in my life something I invested a lot of time to learn to do, and I hate to see it a sunk cost should I lose it.

So, I have a strong "ownership" mentality - especially to things I may own without depriving anyone else of anything ( I do not own rental property, as I abhor people hoarding stuff others have to have for rent-seeking ). But I want to own my car, tools, my own house, whatever, so I do not need to negotiate with anyone else when I want to use it.

Otherwise, I find myself in the position of being a beggar cuz I don't have something I need, giving someone else the power to deny it to me and rent-seek on me.

I find that degrading.

Which has me left with a "what's mine is mine, and what's yours is yours" mentality. I believe this is only a typical result of the have-not side of "rent-seeking".

--"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]